Compulsory religion classes?

Compulsory religious education is being considered for schools in Berlin. The Süddeutsche Zeitung prefers well-planned religious teaching to pseudo-secularism. "The Christian churches react to such ideas by arguing for public Islamic religious teaching. Religious freedom must be something positive, they say. It is not just the absence of impediments, but needs active support, especially in education. Moreover, a purely secular ethic is less neutral than it seems on first glance. As long as the Muslim part of society tends to live more piously than the nominally Christian, state secularism can seem imposed from above. We see this in controversies about caricatures or Rushdie readings in mosques, where non-religious post-Christians provocatively test Muslims' ideas of freedom of opinion and tolerance, playing at being Voltaire on foreign turf. The Muslims concerned are very sensitive to such asymmetries, as they are to double standards over the crucifix and the headscarf."

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